Game

**Seems only fitting that, for my first post in several weeks, I publish an entry that I actually started the night of December 1, 2010. I'm discussing a game we played in grad school on that night.

It gets harder for me, as I age, to find opportunities where I can genuinely learn – especially in a formal setting. Most of the workshops I’m required to attend leave me uninspired and often insulted. I’ve walked away from several classes and seminars believing that I not only knew everything presented, but I could have taught it to the same group in half the time with twice the buy-in.

I’ve been fortunate that, over the last couple of years, I’ve managed to uncover little hideaways where a colleague and I can sneak away and really stretch our skills. Those small discussions that emerge over private lunches or under a green umbrella at Starbucks have ignited several light bulbs, but even if the ideas are new, I’m not easy to blow away anymore. Subconsciously, I think I anticipate these discoveries to the point where, as soon as a new wisdom is revealed, I instinctively add to it. I don’t submit to the revelation – just the opposite. I own it so thoroughly that within a nanosecond, I’m matching it with pieces from my own insight-full closet to design the inspiring Pinza-brand outfit for Fashion Week.

I’m very grateful for the environment I work in that has allowed me to learn quite a bit in my eleventh and twelfth years as a teacher. I just haven’t stumbled upon any Holy Grails of education, and I certainly don’t find myself dumbstruck. I couldn’t tell you the last time my mind felt dwarfed by a mushroom cloud of brilliance. I’m extremely tough to impress, and I am very rarely humbled.

Tonight, I was humbled.

My administration class spent the entire three-hour session playing “Systems Thinking, Systems Changing”, a board game that simulates the experience of trying to reform schools and districts. Think Dungeons and Dragons, but with the wizards and warlocks replaced by superintendents and student body presidents.

Each team of four had a board with twenty-four different game pieces which represented all the stakeholders for the Verifine school district: super, assistant super, two school board members, plus a variety of parents, students, teachers, and staff members from an elementary, a middle, and a high school. The goal of the game is to choose from a menu of activities in order to move all twenty-four people through five stages. Giving them all “awareness” of the district’s challenges or strengths is the first stage; an ongoing “renewal” of self-assessment and adjustments of practice is the final stage. The two moderators of the game – the dungeon masters, if you will – would give specific feedback based on a group’s chosen activities.

Our team felt very good about our process throughout the simulation. We were proud of the progress we had made on our board. We had even encountered some obstacles that we were proud to overcome. In the end, we had attempted the fewest activities and had the fewest stakeholders reach the ultimate stage on the board. We stunk.

This is normally the point where I start to question the game, criticize its premise, and debate the results. When I bombed a midterm assignment in one of my teaching credential classes, I told the professor to her face that she had failed to show me or anyone in the class how to do the assigned task effectively. Why? Cuz I was right, that’s why, and she acknowledged it.

I cannot debate tonight’s results. Almost every time our team submitted an action, we would get the response: “your people aren’t ready for that, yet.” We reversed and repeated the same three activities, trying to address the deficiencies in training or communication that the moderators pointed out. We couldn’t advance our standing as a result. Our score in the end was around 350. Three other teams cleared 1,000 points apiece.

I couldn’t contribute to the post mortem discussion afterwards. I was dumbfounded. How could we feel so good about the process we adhered to and the results we earned, and still be so far behind? The game simulated three full years of school district reform. We struggled to reach the midpoint while others damn near lapped us. My one glimmer of a retort is that I thought the mythical superintendent couldn’t decide whether he wanted to micro-manage or leave us alone, but can I really argue that this part of the game was unfair? Or unrealistic? I cannot.

My ego had been run over, and for the first time in recent memory, out of all the vocations I’ve pondered or practiced, these words flicked on and pierced the darkness – a burning neon sign in my mind: “Maybe I can’t do this.”

Four months removed, I can finally see the game for what it is – a bunch of pieces on a board. I can also find the measure of our team’s success: the satisfaction we all felt in that instant when the game was over and we marveled at our array of poglets. That was a truly shared victory; everyone contributed to the decisions, not just the playing. Other teams delegated their members to simple tasks like scribbling down the next move or running across the room to the dungeon master. These folks never really participated in many decisions, if any. All our heads were together at every step of the process.

Of course, that system slowed us down, but I hesitate to conclude that our direct democracy brought about the fall of our Roman empire. Rather, this exercise isn’t about moving pieces on a flat piece of cardboard. It’s about people. Perhaps the primary flaw in the game was the point-of-view of the players. The two dozen pieces represented every possible stakeholder in a unified school district. So whom did we represent? We couldn’t be the superintendent or a principal; we oversaw everyone. We had a God’s-eye-view, yet we were anything but omnipotent. The forces of nature crashed into our wishes at almost every turn.

Ultimately, any kind of management is about the relationships and interactions between and among human beings. Herein lies my thin lining of silver solace. On the collegiality game board, our team was brilliant. There wasn’t a downtrodden soul among us until we actually saw the scores of the other “school districts”. We swooned with pride, in fact, and I can feel the swoon returning as I write. We succeeded in the most critical phase of leadership. The team was happy. The collective worked in true collaboration. In all honesty, this will be the hallmark of our administrative careers, for every leader assumes a position of limited, far-from-omniscient perspective. It’s actually easier, I feel, to move more pieces across the stages of development if you occupy the same trenches they do. The pawns, knights, and bishops respect their monarchs much more when standing alongside them. Removing oneself from the game at hand – playing the role of grandmaster over all – cannot feasibly serve a school or any working, progressive community.

Maybe I shouldn’t do this. Maybe I shouldn’t play God with my school, pretending to know all, see all, and exhale wisdom with every carbon-dioxide molecule. Maybe I shouldn’t attempt to prod and pull every member of every staff at every site of my district over the several squares of instructional development.

I’m quite content to play the bishop for now. I need not be Bobby Fischer.